Umwelt, Lebenswelt, Dasein & monde vécu – (de)constructing the semiotic cosmology of human existentiality

Abstract

This chapter presents an overview of the conceptions of semiotic universes of meaning opposed, as surrounding environments of animals, to livedthrough environments of humans. Its subject matter constitutes the epistemological deconstruction of the concept of worldhood put forward by philosophers dealing with subjective experience. Regarding its investigative methodology, the chapter alludes to cognitive sources of knowledge about the world, merging thus the mundane and transcendentalist phenomenology with epistemology understood not only as the sets of investigative perspectives or the psychophysiological ability of a cognizer, but also as a narrative activity of a knower. What is new here is the author’s conception of the linguistic-phenomenological epistemology of practice, which considers the complexity of knowledge about the world and the partiality of its cognition. In such a cosmological conception, the reality of everyday life is shown as experienced through man’s being-in-the-world, where the human ‘lifeworld’ turns to be a ‘lived-through’ world. Finally, the chapter puts forward investigative postulates for discussing the relationship between the concepts of world and reality in order to explain the incompatibilities of worldviews in the perception of reality, hierarchies of worlds and semiotic modeling systems, and creative aspects of epistemic ability to construe phenomenal worlds beyond words.